by Amy Bass
“Every mother in the house would gasp,” Wettlaufer remembers, smiling.
Wettlaufer met Shobow and his family at Trinity Jubilee. A graduate of Bates, where he was an All-American runner, Wettlaufer stayed in Lewiston after graduation in the days before Bates alums did such things, first writing sports for the Sun Journal, and then launching a chain of Subway franchises. Wettlaufer had been a longtime volunteer and board member at Trinity Jubilee when the part-time executive director left for another position. The board asked if he’d fill in. He agreed, thinking it would be a quick fix while they searched for a new director.
Part-time became full-time, and temporary became nine years.
Trinity Jubilee is housed in the basement of Trinity Church, a beautiful gray stone Gothic Revival building capped with a bright red belfry. Built in 1879, it sits on the corner of Spruce and Bates Streets just off Kennedy Park. Nearly half of the residents in the surrounding apartments live well below the poverty line.
The entrance to the center is tucked into a shady courtyard with a handful of benches usually occupied by a group of men who smoke, talk, and while away some hours. On warm days, the laughter of kids playing basketball, skateboarding, and swimming at Kennedy—where Dek Hassan works as a lifeguard—filters into the courtyard. The men will sit and listen, watching the pigeons peck away at the dirt. There is always a stash of stale bread for anyone who wants to feed the birds, but not in the courtyard. Take it across the street to the park.
In 1991, long before the first Somalis arrived, Trinity’s congregation decided it wanted to work on the issues of poverty, violence, and substance abuse that saturated the broken-down apartment buildings outside its door. Now a nonprofit organization distinct from the church, Trinity Jubilee offers a number of services, including a soup kitchen that serves a hundred meals a day, six days a week, supported by both Hannaford Supermarkets and Bates College. In the summer, there is breakfast and lunch for kids who usually eat at school.
Trinity Jubilee isn’t glamorous, but it hums along with a noisy, chaotic efficiency, the door from the courtyard opening and closing all day long but especially on Thursdays, when the food pantry is open. The basement hosts a small office, a large industrial kitchen lined with rows of shiny steel refrigerators, a food storage area, and a lounge for those who sleep at the local shelter and need a place to hang out during the day. A list of rules ensures shirts and shoes are worn; people ask before they take; no one swears or smokes; and weapons, alcohol, and drugs never walk through the door.
In recent years, Trinity has added a host of services for refugees and political asylum seekers, helping them navigate their new lives in Lewiston—landlords, taxes, health care, work permits, and job applications. Walmart is a popular employer, and the Trinity staff says it is one of the few companies that not only hires immigrants, but also sticks up for them. The center’s small office has a fax machine and a printer and a place to receive mail.
There’s also a ball pump. All day long, kids bring in soccer balls for air. No matter what is going on—phones ringing, the food pantry line out the door with women chatting, a television show blaring, people sifting through bags of donated clothes—there is always a kid with a ball that needs air.
These days, Somalis are the minority at Trinity, having built up a foundation strong enough to take care of their own. But back when Wettlaufer first became director, the initial waves of Bantu began arriving, with far fewer resources than the ethnic Somalis who’d come before. The food pantry, which once had thirty regular customers, ballooned to more than three hundred families.
Others in Lewiston were helping, to be sure. Catholic Charities’ office in City Hall was the epicenter for refugee support. But for many refugees, their violent and terrifying pasts made them suspicious of such places, worried that housing inspectors or caseworkers might take their children or deport them, or they would lose their Section 8 rental subsidies or food stamps. Trinity Jubilee, on the other hand, didn’t come across as a place of authority. Tall and lanky with a calm demeanor that rarely ruffles, Kim Wettlaufer began to build a strong rapport with the Somalis who came each Thursday for a stock of fresh produce and some canned goods.
“I have been taught,” he answers when asked how he came to know so much about Somali culture and custom. “Everyone was pretty forgiving of any blunders. You think you get to a point where you really know them, and you don’t—there’s so much we can’t begin to comprehend that these families have been through.”
The Somalis dubbed Trinity Jubilee “Maysha Kim,” or Kim’s Place. The name remains even though Wettlaufer turned his position over to fellow Bates graduate and longtime Trinity worker Erin Reed in 2014.
“Yeah, well,” he says when he hears it, dismissing it in his easygoing way. “It’s just easier to say than Trinity—it’s hard to say that word.”
The food pantry was the key to building relationships. It reassured the refugees that Trinity wasn’t going to try to convert them to Christianity, something many of them had worried about in Georgia. Here, volunteers handed out food, diapers—three thousand a month—and advice, but only when asked. Judging by the numbers of people who availed themselves of the services, Wettlaufer knew they were doing something right. That sense was reinforced when Gure Ali, one of the Somali interpreters at Montello Elementary, came to visit. He’d heard good things about the work Wettlaufer was doing and wanted to take a look.
“You’re doing it,” Ali said to Wettlaufer after he observed a while. “You’re actually helping people without asking for anything in return.”
He asked Wettlaufer if he wanted to see where some of the families lived, really get to know them. Wettlaufer jumped at the opportunity.
They walked over to Knox Street, just behind the church. The first apartment they entered had no real furniture, just a few mattresses on the floor. Wettlaufer stood, absorbing what he saw. There were several generations in the room, he realized. Suddenly, the oldest woman went to another room and brought back a chair.
“Fadhiíso!” she ordered Wettlaufer. He sat. It was inconceivable to disobey such a command. The president of the United States, he thought, would be sitting right now.
At the next apartment, four floors up, they knocked. Bilow Farah opened the door. “Ahhh,” she said when she saw Wettlaufer, recognizing him from the food pantry. She invited them in and gave a tour of the apartment.
“And there was Shobow, an eighth-grader,” remembers Wettlaufer. “Already just a brilliant kid.”
In one of the rooms, Farah showed them a makeshift desk with a lamp. She looked at Wettlaufer.
“Study,” she said, tapping the desk. “Study.”
It was, he understood, the only word she knew in English. It might be, he thought, the most important word for her to know.
As Wettlaufer got to know Shobow, he started to pay attention to soccer, a sport he’d never really thought much about. He knew it was important in the lives of the Somalis, and soon enough he became, like SBYA, a link between the families and the school, helping kids to understand the regimens of tryouts, practice schedules, permission slips, and medical forms.
“I’ll be brutally honest: we just have good people take care of it,” says Lewiston Athletic Director Jason Fuller about how the Somali students learned the protocols of playing high school sports. “It’s not that we changed a lot—we had Kim Wettlaufer, who made it his priority.” Each summer, Fuller and Wettlaufer meet to prepare for the new season, figuring out who needs to get a physical, a parent’s signature, and so on.
“I give him all the stuff,” says Fuller, “and Kim goes out and takes care of it. Without Kim Wettlaufer, this doesn’t happen. Period—end of story. His role and influence is monumental in our program.”
Because of his background, Wettlaufer was more typically drawn to track and cross-country, which he has periodically coached at the high school and for Lewiston’s recreational team. But because of their developing relationship with Shobow an
d his family, he and his wife, Carolyn McNamara, who works as a nurse practitioner at the B Street Community Center, got interested in soccer.
“We started watching,” Wettlaufer says, “and then we couldn’t look away.”
When Shobow’s family left Dadaab for Decatur, Georgia, in June 2006, soccer was one of the few things that gave him comfort. It was a tough adjustment. Their neighborhood held new dangers, like drugs and guns. His mother worried constantly about what the neighbors were up to and whether or not her boys were safe while she looked for work.
Shobow just wanted to make friends and kick a ball around. He was thrilled when some boys from his middle school finally asked if he wanted to play football.
“What happened was, some of my black friends,” he says, trailing off and laughing. He still thinks it’s funny that he wasn’t considered to be one of “the black kids” at his school. “They asked me to play football with them—and I didn’t know football wasn’t soccer.”
Shobow wanted friends badly. Everything about America had been so hard. Even though he studied English, he had trouble understanding the Southern accent. But he understood that kids finally wanted to play with him. This is it, he thought. Football will help me fit in.
“You cannot imagine my face,” he recalls. “I was so excited.”
He ran to get ready, the entire time thinking, LET’S GO! He burst outside and saw the boys throwing around what he could only describe as “an egg ball.”
“Hey, Shobow,” one boy yelled. “Let’s play football!”
Shobow didn’t move. This egg ball is not the football I know, he thought. How do I kick this thing? Maybe it’s some kind of warm-up ritual? They’re just chilling while someone gets the real ball? Why is it taking so long?
One of the kids came over and asked why he wasn’t playing. Shobow’s infectious, high-pitched laugh rings out at the memory of it.
“I said to him, ‘This is an EGG BALL!’”
The kid suddenly got it. He explained to Shobow that what he called football in Africa was called soccer in America. This was Georgia; none of them played soccer.
Shobow was crushed. He saw his dream of having friends go down the drain. Middle school, a tough time for any kid, felt even harder now.
“I was trying to grow up, fit in, and it didn’t work for me,” he remembers. “It was tough.”
So in a few months, when his mother said a friend told her to bring the boys to Lewiston because there were good schools and a growing Somali community, Shobow was all-in.
They arrived in December, completely unprepared for the climate. Shobow remembers getting out of the car and thinking he must have been sick because his body shook so badly from the cold. Winter had to be explained to him. He wasn’t sure if he liked it. He definitely did not like the reaction some people had to his family. “Go back to the camp!” people yelled at them. “You don’t belong here!” Just thirteen years old, he remembers thinking, “To where? Is there no country for me?”
He also hated the stereotypes, the things that people assumed about him. Yes, he was black, but he was not a drug dealer. Yes, he was Muslim, but he was not a terrorist. Yes, he was Somali, but he was not a pirate.
His mother told him to focus on his future and what he wanted to accomplish. “Shobow, it’s not where you come from that matters,” she told him. “It’s about who you are and where your destination is.”
Shobow liked school. His broken English served him much better in Maine than it had in Georgia. He began with some ELL classes but found them too easy. After he passed an exam, he was mainstreamed into regular classes.
“So I got into those, and because this was already ordained by God, I guess, I met this kid, Jonny McDonough.”
The story of Shobow and Jonny’s friendship has been fictionalized in Maria Padian’s young adult novel, Out of Nowhere. It is a story that has come to represent the slow integration of Somalis into Maine, with soccer at the very center. The book, which juniors read at Lewiston High School, highlights some of the difficulties Somali students faced in the early days in their new community. It’s the stuff they don’t like to talk about, from racist slurs hurled at them in school hallways to the sharing of cleats and shin guards on the soccer team; a JV player ripping off his gear after a game to throw to a varsity player, who plunges his feet into the sweaty socks and shoes before taking the field, often a few minutes late.
Shobow and Jonny had the same homeroom at Lewiston Middle School and shared a science class. Homeroom didn’t seem like much of anything to Shobow: stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, go to class, and return at the end of the day for announcements. But sometimes they were allowed “laptop time” before going home, during which Shobow liked to read about soccer. He’d comb the Internet for information about his favorite players, like Thierry Henry and Ronaldo, read histories of Pelé, and watch videos to learn new skills. Jonny, the captain of the middle school soccer team, noticed. He also noticed the soccer jerseys Shobow wore to school every day. It was unusual to see a kid in Lewiston wearing shirts like that. Red Sox? Of course. Patriots? Absolutely. Arsenal or Manchester United? Never.
The two started talking about soccer, their common language. Jonny told Shobow about the school team and asked if he’d be interested in playing. It wasn’t like Dadaab, where soccer happened all day without any organization. Jonny told him about the papers he’d need to fill out, the procedures he’d have to follow, and the coaches’ meeting he needed to attend. Finally, Shobow had a friend.
“Soccer,” he says, emotion filling his voice, “became the engine for my life.”
Shobow’s mother understood that soccer was “his thing.” As a little boy in Dadaab, he’d dreamed of playing professionally. Soccer rescued him from his bad days, helping him negotiate his anxieties. So when he asked Farah if he could sign up for the eighth-grade team, she set aside her worries about her son hanging out with a bunch of white kids who weren’t Muslim and who wouldn’t understand their past. Yes, Farah told him. He could join the team.
That fall, Shobow became a standout player for the team, which started winning by large margins. Through soccer, he became more connected to his peers. Each morning after a game, the principal, Maureen LaChappelle, announced the score, often noting how many goals Shobow had made.
“Shobow Saban scored three goals!” Shobow imitates in a high falsetto American accent. He laughs, his dark eyes filled with mischief. “Now I became, like, ‘Who is this mysterious Shobow? Where is he from?’ Every kid was asking about me.”
Shobow and Jonny were friends both on and off the field. Jonny was interested in Shobow, asking him questions about where he was from. At Shobow’s apartment, Jonny tried Somali food, dishes like hilib ari, not just sambusa, for the first time.
“He was not an anthropologist,” says Shobow, laughing, “but he was real interested not just in soccer, but the people, the culture, and me.”
The two forged a bond, talking about what had brought Shobow’s family to the United States, what their prayer rituals meant, why they didn’t eat pork or touch dogs, and why they fasted during Ramadan. Shobow liked the questions, because even as a teenager, he knew that questions were an important step in the building of bridges.
While Shobow had found himself a niche, he was still the only Somali kid on the middle school soccer team, something that confused him because there were so many other Somali students. When he ate lunch in the school cafeteria with his teammates, he knew he stood out. He was conscious that his Somali peers, who ate at another table, casually segregated, thought of him as white. But he didn’t care; he was happy.
“Who is the whitest kid in this photo?” Shobow would ask Jonny, looking at pictures of the team. “You,” Jonny always answered, continuing the joke.
But as Shobow prepared to take the next step and play high school soccer, things were changing. He was not going to be the only Somali kid on the team anymore. The locks were starting to open.
Chapte
r 8
1-2-3 Pamoja Ndugu
Mike McGraw is having a hectic morning. With no first-period class to teach, he has to run out to Grant’s Bakery to pick up some apple pies for International Day for the U.S.A. table. He stopped there earlier on his way to school, but the pies weren’t ready.
“At least we know they’ll be fresh,” he says, and laughs.
Like everyone else in Lewiston, the baker knows McGraw, who buys his family’s Thanksgiving fare at Grant’s every year.
“What will the Somalis make for this event?” the baker asks.
“Sambusa!” McGraw answers. Always sambusa, or “samboos,” as some of his players call the savory pastry.
McGraw says the food thing has been fun with the team, learning about their different cuisines. He remembers once before a game when he saw players huddled around something on the ground. He walked over and took a look; it was a platter of fish, and it smelled delicious. “What is that?” he asked.
“VICTORY FOOD!” they hooted.
McGraw brings the pies to the cafeteria, where students are setting up for the festivities. The U.S.A. table is filled with doughnuts, hot dogs, and chips. He stops to take in the commotion, especially the large group of students gathering around the tables labeled CENTRAL AFRICA, with smaller signs representing Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia.
“It’s a crazy day,” he says to no one in particular, never skipping a beat as a flurry of students comes to greet him. A girl in hijab gives him a big hug, while another asks for a pass to get out of class to help with the tables. Still another wants to schedule a make-up exam after school.
McGraw leaves the cafeteria to get back in time for his second-period sophomore biology class. Sophomores run the maturity gamut; not as gawky as freshmen, they lack the wisdom and smoothness of the older kids. As they take their seats, McGraw hands back the permission slips and $10 bills that some had turned in for a field trip to Morse Mountain. Because of a lack of interest, he says, the field trip is canceled. Students begin to complain, saying they were just about to bring their money in. McGraw shakes his head. A deadline is a deadline; no exceptions.